CS5 Master Collection Applications

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The Adobe CS5 Master Collection includes many other applications besides the video ones I reviewed in my last two posts.  Although I don’t use any of these nearly as extensively in my normal day to day workflow, they all come in handy from time to time.  I don’t use as many of the newer features of these apps, because I usually only need the core functionality, that Adobe established multiple versions back.

Photoshop is probably Adobe’s most popular media creation application.  It should really be called ImageShop at this point, since photo editing is a small slice of Photoshop’s feature set.  It also has extensive tools for digital painting and art, graphical interface design, 3D image manipulation, video effects editing, medical imaging organization, and hundreds of other features.  My primary uses for it at work include titles and graphics for video, and interface development for DVD menus, but I use it for all sorts of other things as well.
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Premiere Pro CS5 with NVidia CUDA

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While all of the Adobe applications have been updated in CS5, clearly Premiere Pro is the centerpiece of this release.  Adobe has been touting the Mercury Playback Engine for months, with new 64bit code, and additional GPU acceleration through NVidia’s CUDA technology.  This acceleration allows highly compressed formats like AVCHD and H.264 to be played back seamlessly in the timeline, and intercut with other formats without transcoding intermediate files or rendering previews.  Premiere Pro now supports native editing of a stunning number of acquisition formats, including HDV, AVCHD, XDCam-HD and XDCam-EX, DVCProHD and AVC-Intra files from P2 Cards, Red R3D files, and my favorite: Canon H.264 DSLR footage.  It can also edit DNxHD and ProRes footage, for greater compatibility with Avid and Final Cut Pro.  DPX sequences are another significant addition to the formats natively supported, for both import and export.  This greatly enhances Premiere Pro’s usefulness as a DI conform tool, especially when combined with native support for so many other source formats.
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Adobe Creative Suite 5 Video Apps

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Adobe announced CS5 at NAB 2010 and has recently begun shipping the retail version.  Now in its fifth iteration, Creative Suite has grown from a compilation of four stand alone applications into a fully integrated product line with extensive content creation functionality.  It is hard to count the number of individual applications that make up the suite, since sub programs have been folded into other applications, and Flash now has multiple variations, with Builder, Catalyst, and Pro.  From a digital post production perspective, the primary applications of concern are clearly Premiere Pro and After Effects, with their subsidiary apps: OnLocation, Media Encoder, and Encore.  Premiere Pro CS5 is clearly the centerpiece of this release, with its new Mercury Playback Engine and optional CUDA based GPU acceleration, but non-video applications like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash still play an important role in many large scale post production workflows, because they are useful in creating supporting artwork and other imagery, and for interfacing your project with the internet in a variety of ways.
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Editing DSLR Footage in Avid

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Avid Media Composer works on a very different paradigm than either Premiere or Final Cut.  This makes the application more stable than its competitors on larger projects with lots of source footage, but involves more steps in the workflow to get your final product. (The recent announcements about Avid’s new features in the upcoming version 5.0 will offer dramatically different options.  New AMA support will allow you to work with DSLR footage and other Quicktime files in a similar fashion to how they are handled by Premiere and Final Cut.  These new workflow options will be further examined in a separate post once the new version is publicly released)  While Avid is capable of doing online quality work, it is most popular as an offline editing program.  
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Live from NAB 2010

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So after the first two days of the show, I have finally found some time to post some info here.  By far, the most revolutionary new development announced at the show, is Avid’s new native support of Quicktime files via AMA in Media Composer 5, which is scheduled to be released on June 10th.  This will effectively eliminate the need for a lengthy conversion process to DNXHD upon import of any Quicktime files.  The primary uses I see for this capability are for native editing of Canon DSLR MOV files which are explicitely supported, even with speed changes and effects, and for live support of Cineform’s active metadata updates, to impliment non-destructive color and stereoscopic 3D workflows.  It also supports native playback of Red R3D files, and hardware outputs from Matrox MXO2 devices.
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Managing Footage in Tapeless Workflows

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File organization has been an important aspect of media management ever since the advent of tapeless workflows.  Prior to that point, any frame of footage could be identified by, and presumably recovered from, a tape name and timecode value.  Once you remove the tape from that paradigm, a new organization system is needed.  In the case of DSLR cameras, this problem is compounded with the removal of unique timecode from the equation as well.  The following post is a detailed description of how I deal with those problems during the post process of large scale projects originating on Canon DSLRs.  Many of the tips below can also be implemented in other tapeless workflows (XD, P2, EX, AVCHD, etc) if desired, but this article will be tailored to DSLR acquisition.
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24p For the Canon 5D Mark II

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This week, Canon has finally released to the public the long awaited 24p firmware update for the EOS 5D Mark II.  It is available for download directly from their site.  So that new development dramatically simplifies the 5D post-production workflow, but doesn’t help the fact that I now have many terabytes of 30p footage for my current project that need to be converted to 24p to intercut with film.  And once we are all done, the unique process that we created to complete the project will be totally obselete.  Ah, progress…Oh well, at least it will be a good movie when we are done, and the next one is going to be a heck of a lot easier to make.  In the meantime, I will keep rendering.
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Shooting a Feature Film on the Canon 5D

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The Canon 5D MarkII was the first DSLR that offered HD video capture capability worth considering as a replacement for film.  Its full sized sensor, full resolution 1080p recording, and high quality 40Mb AVCHD compression differentiated it from all competitors.  I have experimented with many of the other DSLR options on the market, but most of the projects I have worked on for the last year have been shot with the Canon 5D, so the majority of my experience and workflow expertise has been with that particular camera, most of which I will try to share here.  The workflow has improved greatly as the tools have become further developed over the course of the last year.  While the most glaringly obvious issue was that the 5D only shot 30fps, that was acceptable for certain workflows, especially if the 5D was the only camera on a project.
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Recording High-Def Video on DSLRs

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Recording video with DSLR cameras has been the big new trend for a few months now, and while I have been right in the thick of those developments, I have been silent about that on here until now.  I have been putting off writing about my experiences with DSLR based film making for a number of reasons; besides being busy, I was working with beta hardware and software from Canon for a while, so felt obligated not to talk about it.  And the projects I was working on weren’t completed, so I wasn’t sure what details I should be avoiding posting online.  Most all of those developments are now public in some capacity, so I guess it is time to discuss all of the options and technical details on here.
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Elemental Accelerator on NVIDIA Quadro GPUs

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The Elemental Accelerator is a plugin for Adobe Media Encoder CS4 that harnesses the computing power of high end NVIDIA Quadro GPUs to encode video files faster.  It currently supports output to DVD, Blu-Ray, and a variety of other MPEG2 and H.264 formats.  Besides decreasing the time required to export and encode a file, it frees up the CPU for other tasks, so ideally you can continue working while your file is exported, with minimal impact on available performance.  As a side benefit, the encoder includes an option to create 5.1 channel surround AC3 files for DVD and BluRay, which is not otherwise an option in Adobe Media Encoder.
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